‘Can you talk? Do you have a break any time soon?’ His fringe was slightly spiky at the front; it made him look vulnerable and it quivered nervously when he spoke.
‘I finished with Simon,’ I told him, instead of answering his question.
Even at twenty-four his boyishness caught up with him. ‘I know,’ he whispered, and his voice trembled.
I made my excuses to the other bar staff and led him outside to a bench in the university plaza. Students wandered past us like safari animals ranging the plains: they were all a blur, all background. The sun was low in the sky and the afternoon still warm, still brightly lit.
‘I have to know that you feel the same.’ He just said it, no preamble, no explanation. ‘I need to talk to Si about him and me and you, and I need to know that – that you feel the same – before I do it.’
‘I do,’ I said, for the first time.
‘He’ll be very upset, betrayed.’
I nodded, looked at the floor, the detritus of sweet wrappers, leaves, and cigarette ends.
‘But there’s no point in not telling him, in not doing it.’ He reached out for my hand and his skin against mine was like fire. ‘I’m going to tell him today.’
‘Thanks.’ I dared look up at him, at his earnest face, his worried eyes. ‘It’s the right thing.’
‘This is it, you know.’ He leaned in towards me. In the distance someone played a radio through a window, people called out to one another across the quad. Our world was just the tiny space between the two of us. ‘I mean this is really it,’ he said – before we had so much as kissed for the first time. ‘Till death do us part.’
*
Now, as part of our therapy, Simon and I are supposed to email each other every day with memories of Richard – things that touch us and make the past a warm day or a Christmas morning, or things that are less happy, even painful. Over time we’ve got lazy, we either don’t write for days or we send one line at best. More often than not, it ends up being a brief history of what we’ve had to eat.
Tonight, I wait until Leo is engrossed in his music, dancing around his new bedroom without a care in the world and go into my own room. I close the curtains, although there’s nothing and no one outside: an overhanging roof or something obscures my view and I can’t see the stars. It is truly dark in a way I doubt Leo has ever seen. I sit down on my bed and write an email on my phone; at least now I have something to write about.
From: Cate Morris
To: Simon Henderson
Subject: We’ve arrived
Mail: It’s so much worse than I ever thought it could be: I don’t know what I was actually expecting. Not this, anyway. At work we’ve all been telling ourselves that these things are new beginnings, that when one door closes etc, we’ve said it so much we’ve all started believing it. Not that anyone else who took the redundancy is in a cartoon spooky castle in the middle of nowhere.
Not even any food to report today, your godson and I mainly lived on burgers and chocolate biscuits.
Seriously though, I wish you were here. Or Richard. One of you. Anyone really (if that doesn’t make you feel unimportant).
C xxx
PS Did Richard ever mention living here to you?
If there was a time when Simon resented Richard and me, he has never said so. He has been charm and elegance itself from the first time Richard and I met him as a couple.
It didn’t take him long to meet someone new: a succession of someone-news as it turned out. Simon was always the more handsome one, the more outgoing: he’d always found it easier to charm the girls than Richard had.
The three of us got on and pretended it hadn’t happened; that I had never known Simon before Richard and that they were, equally, my two best friends. Girlfriends of mine queued up for years to have a go at being the fourth wheel of our strange little friendship but it never quite-worked out.
One of my best friends tried harder than most. It suited me and I encouraged it at every opportunity. It was going well: we had some good laughs together. And then, one day, we were on the way home from a seaside funfair. We went together in Richard’s car: he drove and I rode shotgun – Simon and Emily were in the back. The boys had won huge teddy bears in displays of uncharacteristic machismo at the sideshows and Emily and I were still laughing at how easily they’d turned into totally different sorts of men once they’d started competing.
The light was fading into dusk, the scent of wheat fields and wild flowers was drifting through the car windows on the warm breeze. It was a balmy dream end to a beautiful day.
Simon saw it at the same time as Richard and me – I don’t know how. The tiny baby rabbit lolloping on soft grey paws across the road.
The moment of brakes and shouts lasted only a second and then we saw the oyster-coloured ball of fur bounce away behind us before lying still in the middle of the lane.
Richard ran from the car, leaving the door open in the road. He crouched by the tiny rabbit, his head in his hands. ‘No, no,’ he kept repeating. I put my hand on his shoulder.
‘Rich, mate, it’s a rabbit. It’s only a rabbit.’ Simon was standing over the two of us and the little dead body. He picked it up by its ears and swung it into the field beside the road. ‘At least another animal can take it.’
‘I killed it.’ Richard was whispering, still squatting in the road. ‘I killed it.’
‘Are you all right, Richard?’ I got him to his feet.
He shook his head, his face was wet with tears.
‘Do you want me to drive?’ I asked. I’d never driven his car before and it seemed intimate somehow.
He nodded and we all got back in the car. Behind us a red Mini beeped to get us to move.
Richard didn’t speak again until we got back to the flat he shared with Simon. ‘Can you stay?’ he asked me. ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’
I didn’t say, ‘It’s just a rabbit.’ Not then or when he woke up screaming in the night. Instead I held him tight, my arms around his muscular back, and murmured, ‘It’s okay, Richard,’ until he went back to sleep.
I think of today’s little fox, a bigger mammal than the rabbit and on a more sensitive day. Not for the first time I am thankful that I have never felt the weight of world as heavily as Richard did. Not for the first time, a diamond dust of resentment grinds in my silent inner self; in the part that always copes, in the part that bears the whole weight of the boy who was once Richard’s world.
*
It takes a second to remember where I am when I wake up. Some things are normal. The duvet cover is mine and instantly recognisable, but the view at the end of its straight blue stripes is completely new. The furniture isn’t mine. The heavy old oak drawers were too solid to move when we tried yesterday; it wasn’t even worth trying the wardrobe. The wardrobe is antique and enormous; it would easily hold any number of children looking for adventures and it will easily hold far more clothes than I have ever owned. The wardrobe smelled the same as the rest of the room when I looked inside – a strange smell, not mothballs and not damp, but a smell of neglect and emptiness, nonetheless. Leo wakes early.
‘And we can go in the garden.’ He is excited and I haven’t been listening or, for that matter, awake. ‘It’s a really big garden. Look.’ Leo pulls the dark velvet curtain away from the window.